Tuesday, September 30, 2008

I was told there'd be obscurity

In a recent issue of The Week, Dzyd Sloane picks her six favorite books—sending me to Google with her selection of Miroslav Krleza's On the Edge of Reason, published by New Directions. I like this: "Imagine Larry David but not funny and involving war and exile."

Monday, September 29, 2008

Image of the day

Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican, said he was “resolute” in his opposition to the measure because it would betray party principles and amount to “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.” —NYT

It just popped up on the iPod on Friday and I didn't know what it was (I have a shuffle) and I rewound (?) it about five times...

(I'm not sure about the video...)

Listen for Duran Duran cleverness at 1:25.

Parenthesis of the Day

A group of three "Islamic extremists" put a firebomb in the North London home of Gibson Square publisher Martin Rynja late Saturday night, and were promptly arrested by Scotland Yard in "a preplanned intelligence-led operation," according to a police spokesperson. (The company's offices are in the same building.) —Publisher's Lunch

Friday, September 26, 2008

"The people all call her Alaska"

Prime green

Dzyd Dennis on Nagisa Oshima:

Like all iconoclasts, Mr. Oshima has a patricidal aspect to his career. “My hatred for Japanese cinema includes absolutely all of it,” he declared. When he made a television documentary on Japanese cinema in 1995, he included only one clip each from older masters like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi. (Four of his own films made it in.) Where others saw refinement, Mr. Oshima saw meek politesse and ossified ideals of beauty. This is a filmmaker who once wrote an essay titled “Banish Green” and excised the color from his movies because he thought it too soothing. —NYT

Thursday, September 25, 2008

"I am thinking of you now..."

"In the three decades that I’ve hankered backward for this book, toward whence it came, almost everything and everybody that has had a connection to Thomas or to his work has disappeared or died along the way. So peculiar have these vanishings been, I admit that I am slightly spooked to be the vessel to bring this extraordinary text back into the world...."

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for September 24, 2008

Time Out Chicago on U. Chicago's reprint of Richard Stark's first three Parker books—a project spearheaded by none other than Dzyd Levi...I recommend all three books wholeheartedly...they will "hold you up"...!

When worlds collide: A recent Gossip Girl had Chuck speaking disdainfully of Blair's British beau as a "Bertie Wooster"...

Scott Bradfield—fan of Cavemen? Read his new story (up at The Fanzine), "Mankind Through the Ages," to find out...

At the Poetry Foundation*, Dzyd Jordan on Joe Brainard's Nancy paintings and Dzyd Mike on the importance of a good book title....

Who is "KongthinPearlmich"? "All his life he has been a recluse. He has avoided the art establishment like the plague." ¶ "A spokesman for Canterbury Cathedral said: 'The work has been offered to Canterbury Cathedral and we are certainly considering it, but we don't know much about the artist.' " ¶ "Experts at Sotheby's and Christie's said they did not recognise the artist's name."...

Strange embedfellows: Google lets you embed books! Not quite sure what this means. (Via L.G. Thomas)...Is it like this, where you can search inside Personal Days?....Speaking of which, is morale low at your company?...

The mighty Sampson Starkweather has a thing (poem?) in Typo 12—here's an excerpt from "A Limitation of Birds":

Browsing through used books on 32nd Street, I heard a young man say into his cell phoneHi, is this the number I’m supposed to call if I find a dead bird in the street?Later, I saw a pigeon lying in the gutter, some boys without shirts onwere poking it with a stick. I wanted to say somethingbut I didn’t know what number to call.

Speaking of poetry—this excerpt from Dzyd Mike's (different Mike's) Colored Squares will have you scratching your head and twitching your fingers—and saying: "More??"...

This Saturday (9/27): Dzyd Leland, Ron Rosenbaum, Robert Polito, and others hold an all-day New School conference on "Lolita in America"....

One more PD reading added: I'll join Paul Beatty, Gary Shteyngart, and other authors to read at an Obama fundraiser on October 19. More info here...

ALL DZYS TEAM MEMBERS please post items of interest!

-----------------------------------*where—contra the bio read at the Brklyn Book Fest!—I no longer work

Haircut one hundred

Monday, September 22, 2008

Meet the Mets (in Buffalo)

The New York Mets are a horrorshow right now, blowing late-game leads with the precision of a Swiss-made timepiece (a Tag Heuer, perhaps?). Jayson Stark of ESPN relays an astonishing statistic from Bill James: that if their games were ended after 6 innings, the Mets would have an 11 1/2 game lead over the Phillies, and if they were ended after 8 innings, the lead would be 6 1/2. Currently, they are trailing by 1.5 games. Incredible.

Which is why I shift my thoughts to more soothing things, like my (and the Dizzies') hometown Buffalo Bisons announcing the Mets as their new parent club. Now, the Mets' farm system can charitably be described as "bare", while the former daddy Cleveland Indians have consistently produced outstanding talent from within (i.e. Grady Sizemore, C.C. Sabathia), so this doesn't bode well for on the field success. But the Mets are my team (a rebellion against my Dad's Yankee-ness), so if on my visits home I can see the exploits of the few gems in the system (Fernando Martinez, Wilmer Flores), then all the better.

Part of the reason the Bisons are so attractive to major league teams (they beat out Syracuse to nab the Mets) is their top notch facilities. It's mind boggling to think of it now, but Pilot Field (now the poetically named Dunn Tire Park) is such a nice ballpark because Buffalo held out hope to land a major league team, and was one of five finalists in 1993 for an expansion team, which eventually went to Florida and Colorado. What would Buffalo be like now if it had a Major League franchise?

As Wikipedia helpfully points out, the stadium was one of the first "retro" style baseball-only stadiums built by the architectural firm HOK Sport, four years before they also built Baltimore's Camden Yards, initiating the template for all new parks, up to and including the new Mets stadium, CitiField, which will open next year along with their new Bisons affiliation. It's fate!

And...let me point out that the undefeated Buffalo Bills are now in first place in the AFC East for the first time since week 2 of 2003. I'm only stating facts, not setting myself up for inevitable disappointment.

Friday, September 19, 2008

Exile on Maipu Street

[MK:] Yes, he loved it. So much so that his birthday anthem was not"Happy Birthday To You" but "The Wall."

[BBC:] How did he discover it?

[MK:] I don't know. The movie of "The Wall" is awful and we watched itinfinite times. At some point I think he knew the dialogue by heart.He liked that kind of music because he said it was a thing of enormousforce, yet vital.

[BBC:] And the Rolling Stones?

[MK:] He loved them, he also said they had an incredible strength. Oneday we were at the Palace hotel in Madrid, waiting to go out fordinner, and I see Mick Jagger coming. He kneels, grabs Borges' handand tells him: "Maestro, I admire you."

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Previous incarnations

Having lived through the Great Depression, Ed Park is more than a little unnerved about this year’s financial turmoil. He remembers the bank closures then and said he and his friends are “scared to death” it could happen again. —The Bulletin

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Printed matter

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Machado about *something*!

The NYT has a piece on the centenary of the death of the great Brazilian writer Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro, Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubás).

Here's an excerpt from Dom Casmurro...here's a review of DC and PMOBC (a/k/a Epitaph of a Small Winner) from 1998...And here's the 1953 NYT review of DC!

UPDATE: L.G. Thomas provides the following backup: A piece on MdA in Context, written by Zulkifar Ghose:

He is like one of those monuments in a city square that people drive past presuming he must be someone important but do not stop to read what it is he has accomplished; some, catching the name, might have an obscure recollection which they associate with another culture’s history, but otherwise his only devotees appear to be a small flock of students whose work is not unlike that of pigeons upon a statue—alighting upon him with a belly full of the latest theoretical jargon which might accidentally have highlighted a curious feature of his anatomy were it not indiscriminately deposited on the whole body.

That name of Ghose will ring a bell for B.S. Johnson fans—he was Johnson's great friend.

Friday, September 12, 2008

This weekend — BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL!

This Sunday I'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival for the second year in a row—despite not living in Brooklyn!—joining Chuck Klosterman and Charles Bock. We'll all be reading from our debut novels—CB from Beautiful Children, CK from the impending Downtown Owl, EP from that old chestnut Personal Days.

Accordions bearing stories

But the literal subject of the work is only the beginning of the discussion: Each hand-crafted, signed copy is composed of an unfolding chip-board casing built by letter-press maven Brandon Mise, which contains pockets for three accordion books bearing two stories each. The seventh story, which is written by Mr. Greenman with intentional gaps in the narrative, is printed on the casing and does something unprecedented: It invites the reader to contribute to the collection.The fourth pocket in the casing contains a postcard that the reader can use to fill in the gaps in Greenman's narrative and send to Hotel St. George Press for possible publication in future online and paperback editions of the book. This experiment, code-named "The Postcard Project," will incorporate work by authors and non-authors alike, resulting in an ever-shifting, community-created story. Learn more about the Postcard Project, overseen by Postmaster Greenman, by visiting our Mail Room.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Ideas, ideas...GOT IT!

The Rock's alive with the sound of music.

Julie Andrews will play boss to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in Tooth Fairy, about a minor-league hockey player who, after spoiling a kid's dreams, is sentenced to one week as a real-life tooth fairy replete with wand and tutu. Andrews is an administrator at the Tooth Fairy Dept. Ashley Judd also stars. —E! News

Monday, September 08, 2008

O.K. What else?

“You told him no dice to the event, correct? What else? Saying what?” Pause. “What else? Which is when? What’s on the calendar now? Right? And her event is what? Whenever you see an invitation that says ‘What could be more magical than an evening under the stars in the Hamptons?’ you press delete. What’s going on with my voice-over for Major League Baseball? What’s their deadline? What else?” He banged the steering wheel. “What? Speak more clearly, I can’t hear you. He said what? Satellite broadcast goes where? I’ll look at that. What else? O.K. Take a deep breath. I don’t know what you’re talking about. What does their letter say? O.K. What else? O.K. What else? O.K. What else?”

License to ille

1. Paper Cuts' Gregory Cowles on Carpenter's Gothic: "Gaddis is not in fact all that difficult."

2. Dzyd Levi on his defining summer '08 reads, Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and Gary Indiana's Do Everything In the Dark.

3. Dzyd Paul on McCain's repetition of "my friends" (in Slate): "Like Dole's use of the dissociative third person—or illeism, a propensity also shared by Elmo and the Incredible Hulk—this year's obsessive invocations to friendship invite scrutiny."

Sunday, September 07, 2008

"Reflections on That Dreadful Tuesday"

Saturday, September 06, 2008

His master's voice

Mr. Melendez’s second career as the voice of Snoopy happened entirely by accident. Because Mr. Schulz would not countenance the idea of a beagle uttering English dialogue, Mr. Melendez recited gibberish into a tape recorder, speeded it up and put the result on the soundtrack.

For his decades of squeaks, squawks and grunts, Mr. Melendez received residuals to the end of his life. —NYT

Dizzies News Service for September 6, 2008

1. Sarah Mangoozles talks to Leonard Lopate about TheTwo Kinds of Decay—very nice! I'm going to try to embed it right onto The Dizzies!

2. More audio: Dzyd Paul is on NPR today, talking about the spelling reform movement—jumping off his epic "Buzzkill" piece in the current Believer—you can read it all online, but you'll want to have a bound copy or two for further perusal!

6. Levi Stahl on John Wyndham. Also: New additions to The Invisible Library, including more titles only found in the books of Nabokov, Powell, Frank Herbert, and more!

7. And in my continuing bid to become the Pierre Menard of the Internet, I have discovered (thanks to a reader) that my "Blogs That Only Lasted for One Post" feature has already been done! But I am not going to look at it...

Thursday, September 04, 2008

The first person plural

Over at Nextbook, Gideon Lewis-Kraus (Dizzyhead status: unknown) writes about German writer Kevin Vennemann's debut novel, Close to Jedenew, which was called "by far the best literary text of the last few years that’s appeared from a writer under thirty."

The “we” who are not breathing are here hiding from their neighbors in an unfinished treehouse, and it is the “we” who narrates throughout. Unlike other recent examples of first-person-plural narration—Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and Ed Park’s Personal Days come to mind—the “we” does not represent a cohort from which individuals are intermittently rotated out for examination, but rather a single narrator here speaking at the center of concentric crowds.

Ochopsycho Nightmare

The Cincinnati Bengals receiver has legally changed his name to Chad Javon Ocho Cinco in Broward County, Fla., a switch that became official this week....Two years ago, Johnson gave himself the moniker—a reference in Spanish to his No. 85—and put it on the back of his uniform before a game. Quarterback Carson Palmer ripped it off before the kickoff. After the season, coach Marvin Lewis—who dislikes Johnson's attention-getting stunts -- referred to the receiver as "Ocho Psycho." —ESPN

American idle

In the NYT Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates began her review of Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife by asking: "Is there a distinctly American experience?" She adds:

“The American,” by Henry James; “An American Tragedy,” by Theodore Dreiser; “The Quiet American,” by Graham Greene; “The Ugly American,” by William Lederer and Eugene Burdick; Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral” and Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho” — each suggests, in its very title, a mythic dimension in which fictitious characters are intended to represent national types or predilections.

A new Dizzies feature!

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Stock footage

Buffalo's Talking Leaves bookstore gets a nice salute from Three Percent, for stocking the new Dubravka Ugresic...and from The Dizzies, for stocking Personal Days! (Buffalonians, why not stock up on both?)

In other PD news (wait, was that last thing "news"?)—PD has been shortlisted for the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize! (Here's the Galleycat post, and here's something else, with more on the prize.)

UPDATE: In further PD news—and yes, that last thing was news—though the jury's still out on item #1!—GET TO THE POINT, PARK—I'll be reading at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, 9/14 at 5 p.m. on the Mainstage. (Website here; click "2008 events.") Once again I join Chuck Klosterman (whose debut novel, Downtown Owl, is coming out soon)...also reading: Charles Bock! I need to change my name so that it is "Charles" based? Maybe that is a joke I can tell before I start reading......hmmm.....

Context: Richard Brautigan/Stark

"There were so many blackberries back in there that it was hard to believe. They were huge like black diamonds but it took a lot of medieval blackberry engineering, chopping entrances and laying bridges, to be successful like the siege of a castle."

That's form a story called "Blackberry Motorist." The title caught my eye, as if it were written yesterday. Motorists using Blackberries while driving! But actually it's from Richard Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962–1970.

Reading a tense passage of description in one of Richard Stark's Parker novels, I realized it wouldn't seem tense without the setup. It would just seem like Parker was looking to buy a used truck.

Stalk footage

This somehow reminds me of the “celery theory” I sometimes jokingly bring up when I feel silly. I have noticed that in every American film in which people are shown taking groceries home, they carry a paper bag that has celery stalks peeking out of it (this happens even in Paris — e.g. “The Girls” — where I never saw anybody buy celery stalks or carry them in a paper bag). My point: there are millions of cliches of that kind that reappear in countless films, and I doubt that the directors in most cases have much to do with it. Did Cukor tell the prop person: “Put celery stalks into that bag and I want to see them sticking out”? Perhaps but I doubt it. And I don’t think it would be very enlightening to describe any director’s work in terms of how many times characters in his films are seen carrying grocery bags with celery stalks peeking out of them.

I hope this celery disquisition will be taken for just what it is: a metaphor.